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Overview

Has European cinema, in the age of globalization, lost contact not only with the world at large, but with its own audiences? Between the thriving festival circuit and the obligatory late-night television slot, is there still a public or a public sphere for European films? Can the cinema be the appropriate medium for a multicultural Europe and its migrating multitudes? Is there a division of representational labor, with Hollywood providing stars and spectacle, the Asian countries exotic color and choreographed action, and Europe a sense of history, place and memory?

This collection of essays by an acclaimed film scholar examines how independent filmmaking in Europe has been reinventing itself since the 1990s, faced by renewed competition from Hollywood and the challenges posed to national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989. Elsaesser reassesses the debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of "world cinema" and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, and the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different allegiances, and new technologies enable networks to reshape identities, but European cinema still has an important function in setting critical and creative agendas, even as its economic and institutional bases are in transition.

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Meet the Author

Thomas Elsaesser is professor of film and television studies in the Department of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author or editor of many books, including The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, also published by Amsterdam University Press.

Table of Contents

National Cinema: Re-Definitions and New Directions
European Culture, National Cinema, the Auteur and Hollywood [1994]
ImpersoNations: National Cinema, Historical Imaginaries [2005]
Film Festival Networks: the New Topographies of Cinema in Europe [2005]
Double Occupancy and Small Adjustments: Space, Place and Policy in the New European Cinema since the 1990s [2005]

Auteurs and Art Cinemas: Modernism and Self-Reference
Ingmar Berman - Person and Persona: The Mountain of Modern Cinema on the Road to Morocco [1994]
Late Losey: Time Lost and Time Found [1985]
Around Painting and the "End of Cinema": A Propos Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse [1992]
Spellbound by Peter Greenaway: In the Dark ... and Into the Light [1996]
The Body as Perceptual Surface: The Films of Johan van der Keuken [2004]
Television and the Author's Cinema: ZDF's Das Kleine Fernsehspiel [1992]
Touching Base: Some German Women Directors in the 1980s [1987]

Europe-Hollywood-Europe
Two Decades in Another Country: Hollywood and the Cinephiles [1975]
Raoul Ruiz's Hypothèse du Tableau Volé [1984]
Images for Sale: The "New" British Cinema [1984]
"If You Want a Life": The Marathon Man [2003]
British Television in the 1980s Through The Looking Glass [1990]
German Cinema Face to Face with Hollywood: Looking into a Two-Way Mirror [2003]

Central Europe Looking West
Of Rats and Revolution: Dusan Makavejev's The Switchboard Operator [1968]
Defining DEFA's Historical Imaginary: The Films of Konrad Wolf [2001]
Under Western Eyes: Who Does Zizek Want? [1995]
Our Balkanist Gaze: About Memory's No Man's Land [2003]

Europe Haunted by History and Empire
Is History an Old Movie? [1986]
Edgar Reitz' Heimat: Memory, Home and Hollywood [1985]
Discourse and History: One Man's War - An Interview with Edgardo Cozarinsky [1984]
Rendezvous with the French Revolution: Ettore Scola's That Night in Varennes [1989]
Joseph Losey's The Go-Between [1972]
Games of Love and Death: Peter Greenaway and Other Englishmen [1988]

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